Thoughts On Topps Baseball Cards
After creating my latest video on the rise and fall of Topps, I’ve kind of had the company on my mind.
Unfortunately, a lot of my thoughts have been somewhat scattered. Some of them are in today’s video, and some of them have been swimming around in my head for the past week or so.
And so, in no particular order, I present to you a few stream of consciousness thoughts about the history of Topps.
Baseball cards have always been king. Topps started making Bazooka Joe comics on the inside of Bazooka bubble gum wrappers sometime around 1947 or 1948. Topps then started to slowly enter the non-sports card market. But there’s a reason why you don’t know much about the old Flags and Soldiers set from 1949, or the old License Plates set, or any of that stuff. Baseball cards have really always been king in the card collecting world, and likely will remain extremely important in the future.
Topps cheated to win. In an attempt to dominate the postwar baseball card market. Bowman decided to sign certain baseball players to exclusive contracts starting in 1948. It is clear from court documents that Topps was aware of the existence of these exclusive contracts; in fact, the Bowman - Leaf court case in early 1949 makes that abundantly clear. Topps decided to go ahead and sign contracts with those players anyway, goading Bowman into a long and expensive legal battle. Bowman wound up folding in late 1955 not because its cards were bad or because Topps had signed up better players, but rather because the legal fight was too expensive to keep up.
Topps hasn’t always been great. I’m not a fan of pretty much anything Topps has made in the last 30 years or so. While I do think this is the longest stretch Topps has had of baseball card futility, it’s not the only time Topps has issued a string of uninspired sets. In particular, the Topps cards from the late 1960s and throughout most of the 1970s strike me as low quality and poorly done - though I know I’ll probably get in trouble for having that opinion.
Topps constantly stretches itself too thin. If you really want to see something eye opening, look at this list of the non-sports sets Topps has come out with over the years. In particular, in the height of the junk wax era, Topps constantly came out with obscure trading card sets in connection with dozens of different intellectual property arrangements. This is similar to what Wizards of the Coast has done with the Magic: The Gathering Universes Beyond concept - except, of course, that Topps printed everything to oblivion. You’ve got to wonder if Topps wouldn’t have had more success if it had focused more attention on its flagship baseball product instead of stretching itself so thin.
Modern Topps isn’t real Topps. As you probably remember, Fanatics purchased Topps back in January 2022. In my opinion, the days of Topps as an independent baseball card company ended as soon as that deal was made. I personally see no reason to support Fanatics, and find that the quality of Topps cards declined dramatically after the purchase (and it’s not like 2021 Topps was great anyway). When people tell you that Topps is the “real” or the most “legitimate” baseball card company, just keep in mind that it’s not much more than a Fanatics brand these days.
I’d love to know what you think about these or any other points.
I really liked the Topps cards from the 1970s, particularly the 1976 set. My least favorites from that decade were 1973 and 1977.
These are all worthy thoughts to consider on a Wednesday morning. I know that I was told throughout my first half-decade or so of collecting that Topps is "The Real One"; after all, it was right there on the packs. But I've always been a Fleer guy. My collection over the years has truly fallen into disarray, but the one piece of it that is still organized and accessible is my run of 1981 - 1989 Fleer sets, which because each contained 660 cards, are all arranged by one number to a page and resting in binders on a bookshelf. Fleer used that white card stock which to me seemed of higher quality than Topps. And notwithstanding the justifiable criticism of some of their choices, in many cases I've favored their designs over Topps, even in 1985 when I started collecting. That 1985 Topps set has become the iconic set of my childhood, but it's kind of muscled its way into my mind in the way Topps muscled their way into the market in the early days when Bowman was the only set in town.